Science Friday - Viking Metal, Possible Futures, Global Pollination. April 30, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Uncovering Metal Crafts Of The Viking Age Vikings are often associated with scenes of boats and fiercely-pitched battles. But new research, published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, shows they also had other, calmer skills. The paper details advances in the cast metalwork of objects, such as keys and ornamental brooches, that occurred in the trading city of Ribe, Denmark in the 8th and 9th century.  Researchers analyzed samples of metal taken from a variety of metal objects found in Ribe, along with metalworking tools, crucibles, molds, and samples of metal slag. They found that while the Vikings began working in brass with a very experimental approach, they quickly standardized their production to use specific blends and alloys of metals. They also adopted more heat-resistant clays for crucibles, and made extensive use of recycling throughout their work processes.  Vana Orfanou, an European Research Commission (ERC) postdoctoral research scientist In the School of Archaeology at University College, Dublin, and lead author on the paper, joins SciFri’s Charles Bergquist to discuss the state of the art in early Scandinavian brass making.    An Illustrated Exploration Of Hypothetical Futures Futurist and Flash Forward host Rose Eveleth spends her time asking a lot of ‘what if’ questions, and then exploring the answers with experts. For example, what if human light sources forever drowned out our dark night sky? What if we relocated endangered species to save them from climate change? What if, as she asked in 2018, we saw a deadly pandemic consume the globe? With a new book that illustrates even more hypothetical futures, she poses even more far-reaching questions: What if we could change our gender like our hair color? What if we could live on as robots after our death? What if we had to pirate the basic pharmaceuticals, like insulin, that keep so many alive?  Eveleth sits down with SciFri’s John Dankosky to explore the nuances of imagining possible futures, whose choices influence what may actually happen, and why this work matters, even when she gets it wrong. Plus, what was predictable—and what was not—about the COVID-19 pandemic.    The Global Pollinating Forces Behind Your Food Importing food from one country to another also means importing the resources that went into growing that food: Nutrients. Water. Sunlight. Human labor. And the labor of the bees, butterflies, or other insects and animals that provide pollination in that country’s ecosystems. Take Brazil, for example—Europe and the United States consume a large proportion of the country’s pollinator-dependent crops, from soybeans to mangoes, avocados, and other fruits. Writing in the scientific journal Science Advances in March, an interdisciplinary team of Brazilian researchers describe a way to quantify and visualize this flow of pollinator effort, from one country to another. They created an interactive web tool that lets anyone see this pollinator flow, for a specific country or a group of countries.  Importantly, the researchers say, the model makes it clear that this flow occurs mostly from poor countries to rich ones—with economic and ecological consequences for the poorer countries. Farmers, for example, may clear more land to grow crops for export, removing valuable pollinator habitat in the process. Those same farmers might then see their yields drop as pollinators die off, thanks to loss of habitat. Producer Christie Taylor talks to two members of the research team, economist Felipe Deodato da Silva e Silva, and ecologist Luisa Carvalheiro, about the importance of considering pollinators in global food trade, and how better informed policy and consumer choices might help preserve threatened biodiversity.  This segment is part of our spring SciFri Book Club. For another culinary exploration, join us in reading Lenore Newman’s Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Irafledo is on vacation. Later this hour, that imported coffee you're drinking wasn't just grown in Brazil. It was pollinated there. A conversation about global food systems and protecting pollinators around the world. Plus, we imagine some possible and not so possible futures. But first, new archaeological research on the Vikings. SciFri's Charles Bergquist is here to tell us more. Hi, Charles. Hey, Jan. When I say Viking, What do you think of? And don't say hats with horns. Okay. No hats with horns. Maybe warships, battles, pillaging. Right, right. Those are all common reactions, which is why I was interested to read this article in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences about the Vikings as really skilled metalworkers.

Oh, yeah. Metalworkers. You mean making swords and armor and horned helmets all for that pillaging that they do? Yeah, no. They're talking about developing the blends and alleles. used in finer molded cast to metalwork, like brass brooches and keys, and how over the course of just a few generations, they've really advanced their metallurgical skills. Oh, really? Interesting. So how did they find this out? So these researchers analyzed samples of metalworking tools and ingots and metal products, all from the coastal town of Riba. Today it calls itself the oldest town in Denmark. It dates back to around the 8th century, and it eventually became an important site for the Vikings, an urban location of maybe a few thousand people with workshop areas, and was a trading center.

It's what archaeologists call an emporium. Oh, so like a big arts and crafts fair where you could see some of the state of the art in Viking material science? Yeah, and sell them to places in your neighborhood. Dr. Vana Urfanu is an ERC postdoctoral research scientist in the the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin. And she's a lead author on this paper. I asked her to give me a picture of what metalwork was like in the rest of the world at the time.

Brass was known in the ironates. We have brass examples from the late Bronze Age, but all these are accidental alloys. They were made accidentally because of the minerals that they were chosen. The first who mastered, let's say, the technology of brass and were able to manufacture it in almost an industrial scale were the Romans. So we see a peak in brass production in the Roman times, but then brass kind of like fades out of the picture of European metallurgy in the post-Roman period. And then again, in the mid-seventh century, in the mid-Saxon period, we have a re-emergent, of zinc in copper alloys. And that's when Riebe is established as well.

So the material in Riebe coincides with this new wave. Some people have even called it the third phase of brass, which in a way it continues up until today, because we use brass in everything in our homes today. So this is when it comes to copper-based aloebs, the picture of that period. In this study, you're looking specifically at non-iron metals. Why is there this distinction between the iron-based materials and the not iron-based materials?

Excellent question. First of all, because in the whole of Scandinavia, we don't really have copper ore. So when we find copper, we know that it was imported. Whereas iron, it was more easily to be locally found and smelt it and hammered into whatever knife or sword. But there is a very interesting technological distinction. and we cannot assume that people who worked with copper also worked with iron because essentially there are different technologies. For the single reason that the first time that Deepel managed to melt to liquefy iron,

that was in the 15th century, not before. So before the 15th century, all iron production is kind of like a solid state metal working. Whereas copper, yes, you melt copper, you can mix it without other alloys, you can be more creative. And that's also what we see in ribbe, where we see copper-based alloys. We see copper and tin, copper and zinc, and lead in various ratios and combinations. But we also have, along with this, we have the technology of silver and gold.

Because, again, you can melt silver and gold. So beyond the brass that you were looking at, they were using precious metals in these workshops, too? Yes, absolutely. We do see this mostly in the analysis of, the byproducts of the metallurgy, the ceramic crossibles and the moulds.

This is where we find traces of silver and gold. We don't have objects of silver and gold or silver gold aloys because as you can imagine, these would have been very highly prized and they would not have let the gold and silver end up in a waste heap in the ground. They would have reused it in the future.

So we don't have objects, But all the other traces, yes, they do point that alongside the copper-based production, there was a precious metal production as well. Where were they getting the actual metal? Was it from very far afield? A study from a very good colleague, Stephen Merkel, who analyzed the provenance of brass ingot bars from Shadebu, Northern Germany, has some very interesting results, but they're not conclusive, but they're still very interesting. So Stephen Merkel says that these bars, it is very likely that they came either from the Balkans or from Andalusia, from the Abirian Peninsula. In either case, this means that they were part of a long-distance exchange network. And they ended up in Germany and maybe in Denmark as well. There is another step in the process that is involved, which is copper alloying.

And that's a problem with provenance studies. Even if I tell you, yes, this copper was coming from this little village in Serbia or from this little village in the coast of Iberia. That's the copper. But what I have, I have brass bars. And at some point, the copper was alloyed with zinc. So this could have taken place in a completely other place. This could have taken place in Germany somewhere. Because the Rhine which floats and ends up in close to Amsterdam was contributing to the seaborne trade.

And this is how these metals ended up in Denmark and Northern Germany, most likely through the Rhine. So anywhere along the Rhine, this could have taken place. So they may not have been blending and allowing the metals themselves. They may have been buying pre-made alloy blends from elsewhere. Oh, most likely, most likely. And that's why we find them in Imgut form. An ingot is a shape of a metal that is tradable. It's like a trademark.

The form tells you something about the quality. of what you're buying. So you have this nice bars, and you can see the color. The color is already an indication of how much zinc is in there. So what we do see in this Viking Emporia, in this Viking trading ports, is that they do have a flare for 20% zinc brass, which is a brass that looks very much like gold. I think this is another very interesting aspect of brass,

because it gives people another way to express themselves. It's another way of expressing your identity with something that looks gold. It's not gold, but many people would not know this. Were they blending metals according to a recipe? I'll take three ingots of this and a half ingot of that, or was it just a knowledge that, oh, if I buy ingots of this specific color from that source, they're going to do what I want? Yeah, it's a bit of both because you choose your brass ingot, the yellow, the sun,

But at the same time in Rebe, we do have small lead bars, which basically they come from Germany. We have done some analysis in another paper. And this come from Germany. So the crafts person or the artist in Rebe would have the brass coming along the Rhine, maybe from the Balkans, maybe from Montelousia, maybe from somewhere else. He would also have the lead coming from Germany. Let is much cheaper. and I think you would want to unlead wherever you would get away with it because a key does not have to look nice. So if you can make it in a cheaper way, then why not?

People have been very efficient. Interesting. So you talk a bit about how rapidly they seem to advance in their technique. Give me a sense of that. How quickly did their metalwork improve over the course of this century? Right. So we purposefully divide their materials. to the 8th century and the beginning of the 9th century.

So we're looking mostly the last few decades of the 8th century and the first few decades of the 9th century. So we're talking about this period. In the 8th century, this is where we see a more... I'll call it random, but not with a negative connotation, not with a negative sense. More experimenting, I have the feeling. They're more happy to use whatever it works.

From the 9th century, it seems that they have already decided what they want. They want brooches with 20% zinc. They're not mixing anything else, and they are making brooches with 20% zinc in the copper. So it's so standard that is what we see in the material that cannot be an accident. Now, how many years would metal worker work? Depends also on the life expectancy, but let's say they work 20 years. So we would have two generations in the 8th century, and then they have already, maybe the grandchildren. I'm very simplifying it here, but maybe the grandchildren of the first metalworkers that read that they already had set their standards.

What would be the equivalent job of these metalworkers today? Should I be thinking of them like jewelers, artists, or something more mundane? That's a million-dollar question, because when we look at all crafts in the process, Sometimes if something looks nice, we call them artists. If something is a fitting or a key, something that we use every day, then we call them craftspeople. I would call them specialized skill force. Irreplaceable, I would say. Does this specific knowledge about how they worked their metal, tell you anything larger about

Viking culture as a whole? It does every technology of the world. every period is a mirror of how the society is organized. So if we find some level of standardization in the metallurgy from a point on, I can, with relative to safety, say that this standardization would be mirrored in all other technologies. And that's why as an archaeologist, I'm also very keen to study past technologies, because they do tell us a lot about how people think.

Dr. Vana Urfano is an ERC postdoctoral research scientist in the School of Archaeology at University of College in Dublin. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you very much. Charles, thanks so much for bringing us that Viking knowledge today. I appreciate it. After the break, what if we finally perfected smart cities or abolished keeping animals as pets? How might we solve crime in space? We're going to take a journey to a dozen or so possible futures right after this.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Let me share some audio from the future. The year is 2033, and a familiar crisis is rocking the globe. Quarantine facilities around the country are struggling to keep pace with the infection rate of S-11, which has been spreading rapidly. Without enough space or resources, they're turning away infected individuals who are contributing to the spread of S-11. Negative, we have no beds. We don't either. What do you want me to do? I don't know, but we have nowhere to put them. Now, I didn't time travel with a tape recorder to capture that sound. Instead, a podcaster and futurist named Rose Avaleth imagined this pandemic future,

overtaxed hospitals and all three years ago, way back in 2018. And that's what she does. She imagines futures, and then for her podcast, flash forward, she talks to real experts about what might actually happen if, say, a pandemic illness sweat the planet, or if we never saw. a dark night sky ever again, or if we found a way to build cities under the ocean. She's here with us today to talk about how and why she imagines the future and about her new book, Flash Forward, an illustrated guide to possible and not so possible tomorrow's. Rose, welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about it. So as a futurist, how did you think a potential pandemic might go down and how to turn out? You know, people ask what I get right on the show sometimes, and that's the one I point to. But I don't want to pat myself on the back too much because every expert you've talked to for years and years will say it's always a question of when and not if for the next pandemic. And that will be true once we're out of this one as well. You know, there are a certain set of variables for a pandemic that you can predict, right? It'll be a virus that we don't know about. There will be questions of things like vaccine rollout.

that will be questions of things like, what do hospitals do? All that stuff is predictable. The things that are harder to predict are cultural, political, right? So in 2018 on the episode, we talked about all the various simulations that the then government had done. And then when certain people were elected, a lot of people were let go from certain positions. And so a lot of the institutional knowledge was gone. And so it was a bit more chaotic, perhaps, than even the simulations predicted.

So you can only go so far with trying to guesstimate how something like a pinnesty. pandemic will go. But the big factors are kind of the same every time in many ways, right? It's a virus that usually we need to figure out and how fast can we do that. And that's what we saw, unfortunately, over the last year. But as you say, some of the hardest stuff to predict is how are people going to react? What are the interpersonal relationships that are going to come out of that? And that's something that I'm sure you grapple with all the time. It might be easy in some way to imagine a political future or a scientific future. But humans, we're weird and the way that we act can can really throw the future into a completely different direction. Yes, humans are very strange creatures.

You know, even our own minds, right? Like, I'm sure everyone has this experience of like, you do something and you're like, why did I do that? Like, even you can't explain your own actions sometimes. And trying to explain vast cultural actions is hard, right? We always know that with any kind of thing like this. There will be a certain group of people who resist the medical establishment. There will be people who will not trust a vaccine, right? We know that that will be true, but who it will be and how the details of that shake out is always sort of a mystery box that you have to open when you get there. So in your podcast, and now also in this book, you take on all these different types of possible futures, like the pandemic, not necessarily all as dark as that, some of the

things you take on like what if fake news wins and what if you could live on as a robot after you die. How do you think about the futures that you want to write about, that you want to podcast about? It's hard to pick because once you get started thinking about things that might happen and, you know, on the show, everything ranges from stuff that's very likely facial recognition, pandemics, all the way out to things that we sort of say, you know, the possible and not so possible. So what would happen if space pirates dragged a second moon to Earth? And the Earth suddenly had two moons and like, how would you capture a moon-sized object? You know, what would that do to the tides?

All those questions. And once you get into that kind of like sort of fictional thinking, it's actually harder to pick than it is to generate ideas. But I think for me, the perfect flashforward episode and the chapter would be the same is something that people might be familiar with. Maybe you've seen headlines. Maybe you kind of like know that certain tech CEOs are fighting about AI. singularity, like, what does that mean? Something that they can do something about. They have agency in. And then something that has some sort of surprise element where it's like, yeah, you might have heard of this thing, but here's that piece that you maybe didn't think about. You know,

like your robot descendant, if you say make a robot copy of your loved one after they die, like, what's the warranty on that? How do you charge the robot? Is there a closet for it? Like, just sort of all these unsexy questions people don't talk about all the time. We kind of like to mix that in there too. Now, when you're picking researchers or experts, people that you want to help you imagine this future, how do you go about that? Because I can imagine that just by the process of picking someone to talk to, that's really influencing what kind of a future you might imagine because everyone brings such different backgrounds and ideas to this. So how do you do your research? How do you find your experts? Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's obvious, right?

If it's a topic that, like, they've published a lot about. You know, we also try to talk to folks who kind of understand the premise of the show. Not everyone is comfortable talking about the future, even though we try to make it very clear on that show that like we're not trying to predict anything. You know, like if we get it right, that's kind of fun and cool. But it's really more about sort of thinking through possibilities than saying like, this is how the future will go because that is a fool's errand as we all know. Like no one's going to get it right. And so the other piece of it is wanting to feature folks who aren't usually, you know, featured in things like science and tech reporting. So, you know, when we do things about universal basic income, for example,

you know, talking to the community aid groups in Jackson, Mississippi, who are doing this, but aren't sort of featured in all the tech coverage of UBI. Or if we're talking about something like CRISPR or technology that is ostensibly for disabled folks, talking to disabled folks about what they think about that technology is super important to the ethos of the show. The book is beautiful, and it's so interestingly put together the way your podcast works, is you imagine these futures and then you unpack it afterward. And the book is laid out very much like this, but you use a kind of a comic book graphic artist style to tell the stories.

Can you talk a bit about that collaboration and why you chose this method to tell some of these futuristic stories? Yeah. You know, people had asked me about writing a flashforward book for years. And I just couldn't imagine it. I didn't want to just rewrite episodes in text. Like, I just couldn't, like, as a listener, I was like, what would I want to buy? and I couldn't think of anything that I would want to buy if I was a listener of the show for a book.

And then actually Sophie Goldstein, who's one of the artists in the book, emailed me and she's a comic artist. And she said, like, have you ever thought about doing a sort of comic adaptation? And that was when, like, sort of the light bulb went off. And I was like, yes, this is perfect. Because what the fictional vignettes do at the top is kind of help you imagine as a listener what you might do in that situation, kind of like step into that world in a really immersive way where you're like sort of using the tools of fiction to help people imagine

these worlds and comics can do the same thing right you're seeing a story you're seeing characters you're connecting with them and then i brought in matt libytchanski who is an incredible artist as well who actually does all the art for the flashforward show sort of like for the website and everything and the three of us worked together on it so sophie and matt were incredibly patient with me who'd never done comics before in my life um and that was a really fun experience so they were great and then we brought in 12 amazing artists it's actually 14 total because two of the chapters are collaborations between two artists and they each were presented with the full list of like over 100 flash forward episodes that they got to kind of like look through.

And from there it was a collaborative process the whole way through. We worked on the storylines, you know, what we wanted to say. And the artists, I tried to give them a lot of freedom, which I think you can tell them the book. They kind of really can embody their style, which was really important to me to kind of have it really feel like a collaboration and not me like telling them what to draw at every stage. Yeah. And I would say one of the only problems with the book is a few of the comics that start each of the chapters. I want them to keep going. They stop short and I want the next episode, which is always something that I assume you

want to leave people with. So if I wanted to be a better futurist and think more about possible futures, I mean, who should I be listening to? Is there something that I should be reading specifically to put myself in the mindset of this? Yeah. I think for me, the key to thinking about the future is seeking out the folks who are kind of living it now and who are kind of on the ground making it work and expanding the idea of who gets to be called a futurist and who is doing futurism, I think is really important.

There are some amazing projects that are out there to use technology, subvert technology, use science. You know, I'm thinking of things like some of the folks who are hacking insulin because it's too expensive for people to buy. Liz Jackson, who's an incredible disabled writer, has a great piece in the New York Times where I think the headline is, Disabled People are the original life hackers because the world is not built for them and they have to figure out how to make it work. And all of those innovations, you then eventually maybe,

see someone monetize later and that money doesn't come back to that community. But all those people are doing that work. And so I think rather than thinking about futurism as a very specific set of technology CEOs, thinking about who is building a future that I personally want to live in and finding those people to listen to and talk to and learn from. Futurism isn't just like who's building the cool flying car. Right. It's also about who's building a literal world that you would want to live in as opposed to one that maybe is Jetsons like, but doesn't care for people. Well, I'm so glad you brought up the Jetsons. I mean, it's funny you say that because I grew up at a time when one view of the world of science fiction was kind of the Jetsons, which was,

wow, this is really cool. All these new things that technology in the future could bring me. And then the other side, it was this kind of dystopia, this idea that everything in the future is going to be horrible. And I'm wondering how you balance those two things. in your mind because for some people the future is just this bright, sunny, optimistic thing, but for others, everything looks like Blade Runner. It's always both, right? Like, the future is so much weirder and more complicated than even any of us can predict, right? Utopias exist for some people now, right?

If you are in the wealthiest set of the population, you're living in a pretty sweet setup, right? For everyone else, maybe not so much. Madeline Ashby has a joke that she likes to tell another amazing futurist where she talks about how the reason why so many very, very wealthy people are obsessed with living forever is because they make compound interest, which I think is very funny. And so, you know, I think thinking through the reality of the situation, right? Like there will always be people who are creating. There will always be people who are subverting technology and using it and kind of doing cool things and making it work. And there will there will always be dystopian pieces to technology. Humans are, again, weird and messy. and often make mistakes. And we can learn from them. We can learn from our past mistakes. But like, there's no perfect version of the future.

It's all baby steps. A lot of the stories that you tell in this book do have quite a bit of darkness to them. And one of them asked the question, what if we had to turn to pirates to get our medications? And you referenced this a little bit earlier in our conversation. But I think it's a really important time to be thinking about this. Our health care system seems to be completely broken. There's questions about whether or not we can. get the COVID vaccine to people in less affluent countries. This is one of those futures that seems

very palpably real right now. Yeah, absolutely. Every day I see the news around patents and the COVID vaccine and who's going to get it and who isn't going to get it. And it just sort of feels like one of those things where like the solution feels so obvious from a humanitarian perspective. And yet, right, like we're still having this conversation about whether that's going to happen. And I think that that's a place where, you know, one of the things, the points I make in that chapter is that it would be better if no one had to pirate drugs, right? It would be better if everyone could just afford the drugs that they need. You know, like my uncle doesn't want to have to learn how to make his own insulin. Like, he doesn't want to have to do that, like in his garage or whatever

it is. This is not a long-term solution, but it is a reaction to what's happening now. And I think we're going to see that with the COVID vaccine. We're going to see, we know it works. And if you can't get it sort of the quote unquote legal official ways, people are going to try to get it. And, you know, there's a solution to this problem that is right there for us and we could just take it. Just a reminder that I'm John Dankowski and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking to podcaster, futurist, and author Rose Eveleth about her new book, Flash Forward, an illustrated guide to possible and not so possible tomorrow's. I think it gets to one of the things that I was thinking a lot about while I was reading your book, is this idea of imagining the future

and predicting the future, right? Like, if I was to imagine a future, I'd imagine a future in which we didn't need to pirate drugs and everyone just got what they needed and also that everyone got along. That's imagining a future. But were I to Rose put money down on a bet to say, what kind of future will there be? I would bet probably that large companies will continue to control the cost. cost of drugs and health care. And it's going to be really hard for all people, but most importantly, a lot of people who are struggling to get the sort of health and health care they need. Those are two very different ways of imagining a future. And I'm wondering how often you feel like you come down on one side or the other. It's a great question. I'm a firm believer that the

most hopeful way of thinking about the future is to be realistic about everything you just said, about all the darkness and all the ways that this could get worse and all of the dark roads we could go down. You have to do the work of imagining those things and thinking through like, okay, if we make this choice, then this happens. And if we make this choice, then this happens. And then I think that the key next step, as opposed to stopping there and saying like, well, oh well, you know, that is the future that's most likely is saying, well, what if we make this other choice, show what that could be and then talk about what that choice would require. And I I think that's sort of the most hopeful way of thinking about the future. It's not about being

utopian or sort of putting your blinders on and just kind of being like, ah, technology will solve everything in some sort of magical way. It's about sort of walking through these scenarios and thinking about, okay, well, if that's the future I want to get to, if that's the version of the future that I want to be in, reverse engineering that. Like, what would be required to get there and being just very strategic about exactly how you would even almost like write that science fiction story and then find those places where you can try and make that happen. I want to leave you with this because, you know, it's not all dystopia this future. And actually your book points to this. The book itself is colorful and lively and it's an art book. And one of the

things I know that you talk about in the book and that you think about a lot is the future of art. And that's, I think, a very hopeful thing for us to think about. Yes. I love thinking about the ways in which artists see the world and just, you know, I mean, this book is very much like, in many ways, a love letter to all the artists that are in it. They are incredible and they did amazing work. Julia Groferrer is the artist who did a specific chapter about AI art and could AI ever make art and sort of this big discussion. But I think like even beyond that, embodying the way that artists see the world can really open up certain futures because there is this kind of interesting prism way of looking at all the different

options and taking a scene and breaking it into its component parts and thinking about how you represent something. All of that is also a type of futurism that we can incorporate into our toolbox. And I think, you know, artists can be futurists just as much as inventors can. That's all the time we have. I want to thank you so much for coming on the program and for talking about this great book. Rose Eveleth is the author of Flash Forward, an illustrated guide to possible and not so possible futures. She hosts and produces the podcast, Flash Forward. Thanks so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. This is fun.

And by the way, if you're hankering to see some of these great illustrated stories that we talked about, good news. An excerpt from one is on our website. It's all about space crime. Take a look. It's sciencefriiday.com slash future. After the break, the foods produced by pollinators travel the globe. We'll talk about the interconnectedness of our food systems and how consumers might just help save the bees. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Take a minute to think about a really good breakfast you had recently. Maybe you started your day with coffee, treated yourself to some avocado with your scrambled eggs, and, ooh, how about that orange juice? Well, producer Christy Taylor's here with some news about those avocados, those oranges, and those coffee beans.

Hey, Christy. Hey there, John. So tell me what's up with the orange juice. Well, John, I really just want us to stop and think about how interconnected we. are with ecosystems around the world. So if you're in the United States, like you and I are, one country that may have produced all those plants you just mentioned is Brazil. And those plants didn't just grow in Brazil. They didn't just soak up the sun and the water and the nutrients in Brazil. They were pollinated there, whether that's by a domesticated honeybee or one of thousands

of species of wild pollinators. So really, when you think about it, what's moving from Brazil to the U.S. isn't just your avocado or your coffee beans, but the work done by pollinators. Which makes total sense, that global food web is dependent on every aspect of the ecosystems where the food's grown. Right, exactly. And maybe, John, you're someone who goes for the organic label with this kind of general idea that that's better for biodiversity. But when you're in the grocery store, John, be honest, do you think about the bees and butterflies and other pollinating animals in Brazil? I have to be honest with you. I probably don't. I think that it's coming from Brazil, but I don't think about all the work that goes into it, especially the work that those pollinators do. Yeah, I'll fess up. I also really don't think about this. The organic label itself doesn't even necessarily help pollinators if, say, a farmer is clearing forest and pollinator habitats with it

in order to grow more of that food that I'm buying, which is why a team of researchers in Brazil started a project to help visualize this global interdependence and raise some awareness around it. Well, this is good because now I am thinking about it. I don't know. I want to learn more. Sure. Well, I talked to two researchers in Brazil on this team, Dr. Felipe Deodata da Silva a Silva. He's an economist and researcher at the Federal University of Mato Grosso and Dr. Luisa Karval Jairo, an ecologist and researcher at the Federal University of Goyais. They helped create this really, really cool tool, which is visualizing this global flow of pollinator effort. They call it the virtual pollination flow, where you can basically plug in any country

and see where the work that their pollinators are doing actually ends up. So here's Louisa explaining the project. It's a way to measure how natural resources are used. in products that are exported that go to international market. That concept exists for water and soil. So what we wanted is to find a way of quantifying the contribution of biodiversity. So I think that's the real beauty, and that's why when Philippi proposed this as a way to bring pollinators to these metrics that are commonly using economy,

I thought it was really a nice way to quantify the contribution of biodiversity. So you're basically visualizing the way the work that pollinators do, so a bee or a midge collects the pollen in Brazil, but then the food that comes of that work ends up in a very different country a lot of the time. Exactly. So it helps to quantify. There are other ways of quantifying the value of pollinators, but locally, so how much they contribute for production for the local economy. And now we are seeing the contribution to the international market. The other aspect of this concept of virtual flow is that international price don't include those environmental costs. You don't pay for the work of the bees. When we highlight this importance, we saw that international market is kind of neglecting this environmental cost, the importance of this service and another resource is another biodiversity service. So this is a very important socio-economic issue. You know, we're not just talking about the big commercial honeybee industry when we talk about these pollinators.

They're all these native pollinators. Yes. Just when we think of bees, there are 20,000 species of bees in the world. And the managed honeybees are a bit more than a handful of species. There are certain crops that are not properly pollinated by these managed pollinators. For many crop species, they are not sufficient. They are not enough and they are not efficient in pollinating. Felipe, when you look at this model, this virtual pollination flow, is there a pattern that becomes more clear or is there just something about it

that gets you really feeling like there's a lot of possibility? We know that developing country export to rich nations, but why those countries are not working together to protect pollination? We know that there is a lot of national policies, for example, in United States, in Europe, but the national policy is very scarce in developing country. International governance must be done. I think when we look at global scale analysis, we can see how much pollinator is important for consumption. and we saw the importance that maybe are being neglected by politicians.

The concern about the decline of pollinators, it started a long time ago, and it's been increasing. Pollinators are just one of the essential functions that we need to be able to ensure that future generations will have quality of life. So it's not the only, but it's certainly an interesting. a function to focus because people can link it directly to their daily lives. It would be nice that more attention is paid to this type of functions and that will probably lead to more protection of biodiversity overall. Speaking of everyday life, when I think of pollinator-dependent foods

that I eat, especially ones that might be imported from another country, I think of fruits and vegetables. What are some of the other crops that people maybe are consuming in rich countries without thinking possibly that are really dependent on pollinators. Coffee. Coffee is a good example. I am drinking mine right now. Exactly. So it's part of daily lives of many, many people. But also there are others that are a bit less obvious. Like, for example, the oils that we use for cooking and producing so many products,

sunflower is dependent on pollinators, palm oil is dependent on pollinators. These are basic ingredients for the production of many other products. that we consume, not only for eating, but also for other products, and they are dependent on pollinators. Another example that might be interesting is cotton. What we know as cotton is the seeds, it's the fruit. Cotton is pollinator dependent, and obvious is very important for industry. Philippi, as you mentioned, this flow from poor countries to rich countries. How does this affect the poor countries to be sending so much of the work of

pollinators abroad? I will focus on socioeconomic aspect. For example, if you dedicate a lot of crop land for international markets, you are restricting areas for national consumption.

But if you export more vegetable or fruit from developing country, the national consumption had less food. The consequence for food security is that those products would be more expensive. For example, if you export a lot of rice, sugar cane, or for example, common bean, common bean is a good example for this. The price here is very expensive.

Louisa, are there ecological consequences too then? There are some products that are 100% dependent on pollinators, but many others are partially dependent. So for example, you can have losses of 30% or 40%, but you will still produce. So when you lose the pollinators, you continue to produce on those lands, but you lose productivity. And for a big farmer that relies a lot on exportation, you might be able to cope with that because it works in a very large scale. But the pollinators are being lost at landscape level. So many small-scale farmers are also affected. And they are not so capable of dealing with this loss of productivity.

For certain crops, there might be ways of compensating, like renting hives or even hand pollination, but they are extremely expensive. So they are only accessible to large farmers, not to small-scale farmers. Felipe, we have now then this tool. You talked about how it would be really great if there was more awareness and conversation around pollinators. Our listeners are in the U.S. If they're trying to be kind to pollinators,

does this mean they should be avoiding buying products from countries like Brazil, where this flow is really heavy? Or is there another solution? We are not against international trade. Avoiding importation is not a solution here. We discussed this. that international trade should be more sustainable.

For example, stimulating certifier products, organic products, international governments to transfer technology and financial resources to poor country that don't have economic conditions to apply to native-friendly practice. If you avoid the importation, international trade, the poor country will suffer, because they need money, you know. We argued that international market should be more sustainable

and not stop the flow. We should make the flow more green. You mentioned earlier, we don't pay the bees or we don't pay for the bees. If I could Venmo a bee for its work, or at least like spend the money that represents the effort of the bees and other pollinators, would that help? What market can do, what consumer can do, it's more via prices and certification of products.

And what government can do, maybe is international government to transfer financial resources or technological resources to create conditions for a poor nation, especially family farmers that Louisa mentioned, to apply those practices. So we were talking about, certifying products that have been created in a pollinator-friendly way, right? Not just saying pollinators made this, but the farm on which it was grown uses pollinator-friendly

practices. Certified products, maybe we don't need a pollinator-friendly product. But for example, coffee. Coffee is a market when certification is well-established. and the certification of coffee include many environmental practice and some of that benefits pollinators.

So I think that pollinators maybe is not a strong argumentation to make all those transformations, but would be a little step to discuss about the whole biodiversity, the whole nature. So I think the certification in general, certification that benefits conservation, biodiversity would be sufficient to protect pollinator.

I think we don't need a specific certification for bees, you know? I think I just have one last question, which, Louisa, I'll start with you, is just what else do pollinators need? do you think it'll take to make sure we have pollinators well into the future? So one thing that I think it's important and that I think about a lot is that what makes sustainable practices go forward, it's frequently economics and not so much the ethical part of the question. So I think what moves the market frequently, it's the consumers that are looking for cheaper products. So those are the ones that will not buy a product that will be more

expensive because it's certified. And those have an important role in the market. And so they will influence the practices of the farmers. There are already studies that show how farming can be more sustainable and profitable at the same time for the producers. And this needs more attention so that the information reaches the stakeholders, in this case the farmers, and that training is given to the farmers so that this can be more implemented in a more general way. Just a quick reminder, I'm Christy Taylor, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking about the flow of pollinator effort around the globe. You talked about this certification for biodiversity protection.

Is there anything else that you hope might help incentivize the steps that are necessary to protect pollinators? We are arguing the government intervention on this international problem, that is the decline of pollinator, because farmers don't know that they are benefited by pollinator. For example, some farmers, for example, the producers of coffee, cocoa, apple, they know that pollinator is very important and they apply managed at B. But for example, soybean producers, common bean producers, they don't know that pollinator is important. So the effort to government make politicians to inform farmers of those benefits and to stimulate with economic instruments.

I think that the huge difficult here is how create international governance, how create international policy that translate in local practice. And that local practice is appropriated to local context. So this is a very difficult task. Philippi, Luisa, thank you both so much for your time today. Thank you very much for your interesting our work. Thank you for your attention for all the curiosity about our project. Dr. Felipe Deodata de Silva is an economist and researcher at the Federal University of Mato Grosso.

And Dr. Luisa Karvalyairo is an ecologist and researcher at the Federal University of Goyais, both in Brazil. I'm Christy Taylor. Thanks, Christy. I hope someday I can go to the grocery store and see a pollinator-friendly label on the produce. Me too. In the meantime, if you're interested in learning more about the importance of biodiversity for our food, including the ways threats to pollinators could shape our eating habits, our book club for Lenore Newman's Lost Feast is still going strong. Join us next week for a Zoom chat about indigenous food systems, join our online discussion community, and even take a look at that pollinator global flow map.

Everything you need is at sciencefriday.com slash book club. Thanks so much, Christy. And that is it for our show this week. If you missed any part of this program, or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts. Or you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. You know, every day is now Science Friday.

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